Paul Allen Sues Apple, Google, Facebook, Others Over Web Patents

Monday Aug 30th 2010 by Datamation.com Staff

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The Microsoft co-founder has sued 11 different companies for violating four patents that belong to a company he owns.

Computerworld: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has filed lawsuits in a federal court against AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and Google's YouTube. The suit alleges the companies violated four patents owned by Interval Licensing, a company which belongs to Allen. The bulk of the lawsuits surround two patents: number 6,263,507, "Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data," and number 6,757,682, "Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest."

Forbes says Allen is the 37th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $13.5 billion.